New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims

By Red Hen Press

From the Introduction: “The goal with this anthology is to represent that full range of contemporary expressions of Islam, as well as a full range of genres—poetry, fiction, essay, memoir, political writing, cultural writing, and of course plenty of texts which mix and match and blur all of these modes . . . the trajectories between the pieces—like that of kismet—will be multiple, nonlinear, abstract. The Muslim community is plural and contradictory. This collection of voices ought to be symphony and cacophony at once, like the body of Muslims as they are today.”—Kazim Ali

• Language: English
• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Release date: Nov 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781636280073

Book preview

New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims

Copyright © 2021 by Red Hen Press

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.

Book design by Mark E. Cull

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ali, Kazim, 1971– editor.

Title: New moons : contemporary writing by North American Muslims / edited by Kazim Ali.

Description: First editon. | Pasadena, CA : Red Hen Press, [2021]

Identifiers: LCCN 2021017028 (print) | LCCN 2021017029 (ebook) | ISBN 9781636280066 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781636280073 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: American literature—Muslim authors. | Muslims—United States—Literary collections. | Muslims—North America—Literary collections. | Islam—Literary collections. | LCGFT: Poetry. | Fiction. | Essays.

Classification: LCC PS508.M87 N49 2021 (print) | LCC PS508.M87 (ebook) | DDC 810.8/0921297—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021017028

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021017029

The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey & Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Meta & George Rosenberg Foundation, the Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation, the Adams Family Foundation, Amazon Literary Partnership, the Sam Francis Foundation, and the Mara W. Breech Foundation partially support Red Hen Press.

First Edition

Published by Red Hen Press

www.redhen.org

Acknowledgments & Permissions

The editor would like to thank and acknowledge the journals and publications in which some of these works have previously appeared:

A dream is a merciful thing by Mahdi Chowdhury was originally published in Popula (2019). Reprinted by permission of the author.

Choke, The Feast, Google Search Autocomplete, and Snake Oil, Snake Bite from Bring Now the Angels by Dilruba Ahmed, © 2020. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Ghazal for the Girl in the Photo by Shadab Zeest Hashmi was originally published in POEM magazine, UK. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Lashes by Marina Reza was originally published in SAND Journal (2019). Reprinted by permission of the author.

On Language & Mourning by Noor Hindi was originally published in American Poetry Review. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Portrait of My Father Drowning by Tariq Luthun was originally published in Crab Orchard Review (2019). Reprinted by permission of the author.

Qasida of 700,000 Years of Love by Shadab Zeest Hashmi was originally published in POEM magazine, UK. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Quebec Was The Semi-Colon by Haroon Moghul was originally published in Stranded In Between: An American and a Muslim, Haaretz (2016). Reprinted by permission of the author.

The Summer My Cousin Went Missing by Tariq Luthun was originally published in Michigan Quarterly Review (2020). Reprinted by permission of the author.

untitled by Tariq Shah was originally published in jubilat, issue 35. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Upon Leaving the Diamond to Catch 14 Stitches in My Left Brow by Tariq Luthun was originally published in Mizna (2017). Reprinted by permission of the author.

Woman-Crisp by Mohja Kahf was originally published on the Thirteen Myna Birds Blogspot (2017), then in Kahf’s book My Lover Feeds Me Grapefruit (Press 53, 2020). Reprinted by permission of the author.

You Care More About Me Being Black Than I Do—Reflections on an Interracial Marriage by Mahin Ibrahim was originally published in Amaliah (2019). Reprinted by permission of the author.

Contents

Kazim Ali

Introduction

Dilruba Ahmed

Choke

The Feast

Google Search Autocomplete

Snake Oil, Snake Bite

Hina Ahmed

Oxygen

Tanzila Ahmed

Muslimah Fight Club

Kaveh Akbar

Learning to Pray

Every Drunk Wants to Die Sober It’s How We Beat the Game

Being in This World Makes Me Feel Like a Time Traveler

Heritage

Sarah Ghazal Ali

in which Nisa bargains unevenly

self-portrait as body written for God

Threa Almontaser

Spray of Citrus and a Month-Long Suffering

Raghead Gains Enlightenment

Hala Alyan

A Good Penance

Barrak Alzaid

The Lesson

Ruth Awad

The Keeper of Allah’s Hidden Names

Let me be a lamb in a world that wants my lion.

Amor Fati

a. azad

shahadah

Ayeh Bandeh-Ahmadi

Arab Sheik

Mariam Bazeed

pure, again

Mandy Fessenden Brauer

Memories of Palestine During the First Intifada

Hayan Charara

Bees, Honeycombs, Honey

Being Muslim

What They Did

Leila Chatti

Night Lament in Hergla

What Do Arabs Think of Ghosts?

Muslim Christmas

Zara Chowdhary

Slow Violence

Mahdi Chowdhury

A dream is a merciful thing

Aslan Demir

My Mother’s Rugs

Ramy El-Etreby

(Muslim) Americans in Service—A Civil Drama (an excerpt)

Hazem Fahmy

Abdel Halim Performs a Private Concert for My Mother

At the Gates, Mikhail Makes Me a Feast of Rain and Dirt

Tarfia Faizullah

Infinity Ghazal Beginning with Lice and Never Ending with Lies

That One Time I Stayed Up All Night Making Excuses to Talk to Danger

Yahya Frederickson

What I Learn about Poetry In Syria

What I Learn about Poetry In Yemen

Farah Ghafoor

End of the World Poem

How to Talk White

Lamya H

How to De-queer Your Apartment

Samina Hadi-Tabassum

Maqbool

Umar Hanif

For Hasan Faqih on a Hat You Don’t Remember

Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Ghazal for the Girl in the Photo

Qasida of 700,000 Years of Love

Noor Hindi

On Language & Mourning

Mahin Ibrahim

You Care More about Me Being Black Than I Do—Reflections on an Interracial Marriage

Hilal Isler

Never Forget

Mohja Kahf

Woman-crisp

Off Your Ars Poetica

Exile Is a Dream Like This

Sheba Karim

The Lives of Pious Women

Seelai Karzai

The Night Journey

Saba Keramati

Namaaz

At Headlands National Park

Nightlong Longing

Naazish Yar Khan

Lost in Translation between Delhi and Chicago

Nashwa Khan

[untitled]

Shamima Khan

Fall

Uzma Aslam Khan

Stealth Christian, Stealth Muslim

Serena W. Lin

People Here Love You

Tariq Luthun

The Summer My Cousin Went Missing

Ode to Brown Child on an Airplane for the First Time

I Sing This Elegy for the Nameless

Upon Leaving the Diamond to Catch 14 Stitches in My Brow

Political Poem

I Go to the Backyard to Pick Mint Leaves for My Mother

Tara Mesalik MacMahon

A Pilgrimage to the Hives of Withered Bees

Even the Sky Bleeds

Haroon Moghul

Quebec Was the Semi-Colon

Faisal Mohyuddin

Ghazal for the Diaspora

Song of Myself as a Tomorrow

Nour Naas

Mother(land)

Leila Christine Nadir

Cold War

Noor Ibn Najam

questions arabic asked in english

Samina Najmi

Memoir in Dust

Threshold

Sham-e-Ali Nayeem

Partition Story

REMEMBER THE NIGHT

Zeeshan Pathan

Rampant, I

To A Mother Tongue I Can No Longer Pronounce

Lorca, II

Hana Qwfan

Ghusl

Unowned Body Parts

Anisa Rahim

A Russian Hacked My Pinterest Account

Hot Carpets

Duaa Randhawa

A piece from Bouts

Sehrish Ranjha

He Never Had His Own Story

Aatif Rashid

My Racist Girlfriend

Alicia Razvi

The Hands of Fate

Bushra Rehman

Rapunzel’s Mother or a Pakistani Woman Newly Arrived in America

Ammi’s Cassettes

Masjid

Marina Reza

Lashes

Zohra Saed

Aqua Net Days

Omar Sarwar

Origami Butterfly

Deonna Kelli Sayed

Sharia Love, Sort Of

Tariq Shah

untitled

Deema Shehabi

Ghazal: A Lover’s Quarrel with the World

Robert Frost at the Alumnae Garden

Adeeba Talukder

Ghazal

January 9th, 2008

Fatima van Hattum

5.11.18

Rocks and Fiction

Rabía van Hattum

End of Ramadan

Notes from Lefke

Seema Yasmin

Dhosa

Contributors’ Notes

KAZIM ALI

Introduction

At the outset, I want to suggest that the project of this anthology may run counter to the most common purposes of such anthology, which would normally be to suggest an arc or trajectory or a range of common interests of Muslim writers. But it is hard to say what a Muslim is. There are, of course, a multiplicity of Islams, a range of perspectives and schools of thought about the way to practice, what the religion means, and how to access the divine. This plurality is historical: nearly immediately upon its founding, there were already multiple streams of Islams, lineages that continued, in the first generation of Islam’s founding, to diverge. As Islam spread, within the two centuries following the Prophet’s death, across the Maghreb to the west and then into Spain and France to the north and into the rest of Africa to the south, and along the Silk Roads into China to the east, and on into South Asia and Oceania, and eventually to the Americas via the slave trade, Islam continued to develop, change, and grow, and to influence and be influenced by the cultures it encountered. Islam as it’s practiced in the Middle East bears only some similarities to the culturally distinct South Asian Islam and so on. This flowering found what many scholars consider to be its first Golden Age in the medieval Arab Mediterranean, including the Levant, Italy, North Africa, and, particularly, in the Western Caliphate whose capital was in Al-Andalus in the southern Iberian Peninsula. It was there in cities like Granada, Toledo, Seville, and Cordoba, that Muslim scholars, artists, and artisans were pioneering astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, architecture, garden design, poetry, bookmaking and illumination, the study of languages and translation, physics, engineering, music, and dance.

My point is that that this plurality is neither modern, postmodern or contemporary—or if it is modern, it is modern in the sense that Syrian poet Adonis used the term: that modernity came to the Arab world in the seventh century with the spread of Islam across the region and the conversion of the political institutions of the day. This plurality has been part and parcel of Islam since nearly the moment of its founding.

I wanted to put together this archive of writing precisely because I wanted to begin to shape a new definition of Muslim, of Islam. Maybe it is a strange thing for someone like me—someone at odds with the tradition, someone who struggles with the expectations of what it means to be Muslim in the first place—to be editing an anthology of writing by North American Muslims. On the other hand, maybe that is precisely the reason why I can.

Muslim writing in North America is older than anyone supposes. Most, if not all, of the first Western Africans who lived here—brought as enslaved labor—were practicing Muslims and had been for hundreds of years before their capture. The Islam they practiced was generational, sophisticated, and infused with a deeply African spiritual and philosophical framework. To my mind, the theology of liberation that drove Southern Black Christianity as it was practiced among enslaved African populations, from their arrival through to the Civil Rights movement and the present day, has its roots in the deeply foundational liberation theology of original Islam.

In fact, Islam, at its heart and at its foundation—at its fundament, I might dare say—is cosmopolitan, multicultural, multilingual, anticapitalist, feminist, friendly to alternative family and community structures, and radical in its approach to questions of religious and political authority. So radical, in fact, that within years of the passing of the Prophet and the original generation of teachers, what Muslims call his companions, the ruling classes of the era had fully co-opted the teachings, eliminated the democratic oral transmission of scripture by canonizing a written version of the Quran and destroying all variants, and marginalized or murdered most of the teachers who taught alternative doctrines to that which was approved by the political elite ruling from first Damascus, then later Baghdad and later still Cairo. It wasn’t until the ascendance hundreds of years later of the more socially liberal Western Caliphate in Al-Andalus that Islam began to once more resemble the Islam of its earliest days.

I was raised a Shia Muslim. Depending on who you listen to, the essential difference between Sunni and Shia Islam is that upon the Prophet’s death, the Shia followed what they believe to be the oral transmission of the Prophet regarding succession by following Ali, his son-in-law, while Sunnis followed the more dominant group at the time (and since then) when the collective of chieftains elected Abu Bakr, one of the Prophet’s companions, to succeed him as Caliph. While the Shias revere the imams, the Sunni revere the first four of these Caliphs, referred to Rashidun, or The Rightly Guided.

For a time the Rashidun, the political rulers of the empire, were elected (by the elite, granted, but still a rudimentary form of democracy)—after Abu Bakr, the general Umar took the reins; he was followed by Osman, who codified the Quran into a written canon and collected and destroyed all variants, and finally the Prophet’s son-in-law Ali took the Caliphate. Upon Ali’s assassination by a rival power group, the Caliphate began a steady transformation into a hereditary monarchy of various dynasties. Meanwhile, on the margins of the government that came to rule in the capital, the Shia followed a lineage of teachers descended from Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter—first Ali, then his sons, and then in a patrilineal line to the last of the Twelver Shia imams, Al-Mahdi. There are numerous other branches of Shi’ism which follow different lineages descended from Fatima, including some with women teachers, even in the earliest days of Islam. That’s why the term Muslim fundamentalist is a supreme irony. Because almost as soon as breath left the body of the Prophet, the Body of Islam fractured, and within a single generation there were countless factions and factions within factions. The movements now commonly associated with the notion of a fundamentalist—the Wahabi and Salafi movements—are twentieth-century movements founded in response to continued European aggression and colonization following the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the early part of the century.

To be sure there existed in the rough center of this matrix an outline of a figure—to this day in paintings and images his face remains blank, mere outline—called Mohammed, but one Mohammed has very little to do with another. In fact, classical Islamic arts, such as calligraphy, geometry, and architecture, center nonrepresentation and visual abstraction. As Cairo-based art critic Lilian Karnouk writes,

Islamic art is an adventure in nonfiguration dictated by a rejection of the Pythagorean idea of man as the measure of all things. The Islamic artist opts for an aesthetic process rooted in religious transcendence: an art based on harmonies of the formal elements of line, surface, and color arranged to a mathematical perception of time and space. His intention is to attain the visualization of a thought which does not represent man or nature but life understood as energy and motion.

Islam as a system of belief, like poetry itself, incorporates doubt and questioning into its fiber because even though one can be considered Muslim by birth, one still has to recite the shahada to embrace Islam and declare oneself a believer. In fact, in Twelver Shi’ism, this choice is codified further: since Al-Mahdi is absent—or at very least, unseen—each Shia person is required to select a contemporary scholar to be their own spiritual leader. It is not uncommon for different people in the same household to have different spiritual leaders.

One significant verse of the Quran appears near its beginning This is the book. In it there is no doubt. Growing up under the shadow of such an authoritarian dictum, I continually wondered at my own doubts, engagements with faith, forays away, through, and within dogmatic teachings. Only recently, in a new translation by Muhammad Sarwer, I read a different rendering of the same verse: There is no doubt this book is a guide for the pious. It’s not just the wording, but also the punctuation (in fact Sarwer’s is closer to the original Arabic), which opens the meaning up. There is space in the book—for engagement, for conversation, for interpretation.

My father told me once about the story of one hundred and four books revealed by God to prophets through the ages to all the various peoples of the world. For each people, throughout time, there was a different revelation, in a form that they would be able to hear and understand. Four of these books are mentioned by name in the Quran—the Taurat, the Quran itself, the Injeel of Isa (considered to be a lost text), and the Zubuur—the Psalms of David—but a Muslim would believe there a hundred others out there whose names we do not know—that perhaps the Bhagavad-Gita is one, or the Heart Sutra, or the Yoga Sutras, or the Popol Vuh, who can say?

The hundred books of course call to mind the hundred names of God, of which ninety-nine are named in tradition, the last one being secret. Always this dark place, the place of unknown, the place you cannot go. A place where you are not sure what is what.

This sense of unsurety is even built into the very way we celebrate the revelation of this Quran. During the month of fasting—Ramadhan—we celebrate Lail-at-al-Qadr, the Night of Majesty, on which the scripture was said to be first revealed. But scholars do not agree on the actual historical date, saying only it is an odd-numbered evening in the last third of the month. So traditionally we celebrate the occasion on three separate evenings—the nineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-third evenings. It sounds manic and amazing and it is. It’s a miracle of unknowing and allowing the mystery of that subsume the centralization or systemizing of a single day.

The beginning and ending of the lunar months of the Islamic calendar are similarly fraught with disagreements. Many people believe the month itself has not started unless the very first sliver of the moon is officially sighted. For those of us who live in the West, we more often than not depend upon the visions of those living far away, on the other side of the world. In the final days of the fasting month, I can still remember my father on the phone with Iran or Pakistan, waiting to hear if the moon had been sighted there. Had it been, it would signal the end of our fast, thousands of miles away.

The tricky moon was also the site of one of the Prophet’s major miracles. While Jesus fed the masses and Moses parted the sea, Prophet Mohammed’s miracle was, appropriately, centered upon the night sky—he pointed to the moon once and it broke in half.

The written scripture itself was revealed to a man said to be illiterate. He was commanded to read by the Angel Gabriel and protested that he could not read, and so came the first revealed verse of the Quran: Say: in the name of Your Lord Who created you. And so the angel coached the Prophet into memorizing those lines of poetry a few at a time. Rather than elide the role of the text as text told from one being to another, the exhortation say—in Arabic qul—occurs hundreds more times across the Quran.

The chronology of the Quran is similarly disguised in its written form. The Prophet came down from the mountain and dictated it to scribes; eventually these verses were organized into chapters, and the chapters themselves were given a canonical order. This order, unlike the long deliberative process surrounding the compiling of the Bible as we now know it, has not changed from that first arrangement under Caliph Usman and is the one thing that all of the sundry sects of Islam do share in common and agree upon.

It’s the word and not the man or his flesh or even the definitive understanding of the word itself that reigns supreme in the Islamic consciousness. There hasn’t seemed to have been the same kind of lively tradition of commentary and cross-commentary on Quranic scripture as there as been in Judaism. The real heart of the controversy around Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses was not after all on the caricature of the Prophet, but rather on the triggering plot device—that Satan had managed to corrupt the scribe taking dictation of the Quran, inducing him to introduce false verses into the scripture.

In such a fundamentally decentralized religion where even the satellite in the sky could break into pieces, when the one thing that everyone could hold onto was called into question, even fictionally, all hell broke loose. Literally. The great shame is that the novel remained widely unread in the Muslim world, when it is the one book that comes so close to describe the fever and fervor of Islamic thought, the art based on harmonies of the formal elements of line, surface, and color arranged to a mathematical perception of time and space of which Karnouk spoke.

It remains the province of poetry, an art made for the doubting and the doubtful, to create structures for meaning, to privilege and plumb the notions of bewilderment, doubt, and interrogative spirituality. Though Islam requires five daily prayers and an obligatory pilgrimage, the Prophet also said, one hour of work towards attaining knowledge is worth sixty years of worship.

And what is that worship towards? The five daily prayers are performed in the direction of the qibla—the direction toward the Mecca Masjid, more specifically to the Kaaba, a black square structure at its heart. The famous hajj, obligatory on every adult Muslim, takes one to this same building, called colloquially the House of God. The house itself—like every mosque—is empty inside.

What I mean to say is that what makes an anthology like this interesting are precisely the reasons it would seem on the surface to be irrelevant. Each of the writers contained in this anthology brings their own relationship with Islam to the page. It is not always apparent from writer to writer how they are positioning themselves within the context of Islam. This collection includes the religious of all stripes; practicing and nonpracticing; the cultural Muslim; the secular Muslim; the feminist Muslim; Muslims of various gender identities, sexualities, and national origins. The writers within are converts, reverts, good Muslims, bad Muslims, born Muslim, ex-Muslim, and trying-to-be or failing-to-be Muslim. I choose to refute any ghost of a trajectory by structuring the anthology in alphabetical order. In this sense, the architecture that is created will be by chance divination—the alphabet being as magical and ordinary an ordering system as any other. My goal with this anthology was to represent that full range of contemporary expressions of Islam, as well as a full range of genres—poetry, fiction, essay, memoir, political writing, cultural writing, and of course plenty of texts that mix and match and blur all of these modes.

Not only is the figure of the editor effaced, but the trajectories between the pieces—like that of kismet—will be multiple, nonlinear, abstract. The Muslim community is plural and contradictory. This collection of voices ought to be symphony and cacophony at once, like the body of Muslims as they are today.

Kazim Ali

San Diego, California

DILRUBA AHMED

Choke

Was there a beanstalk, a golden-egg-laying hen?

No. Just a magic seed.

A courtyard of crooked men.

Was there a giant?

There must always be a giant.

In how many ways did the giant try to choke you?

He did not attempt this with bare hands.

In how many ways did the giant try to choke you?

He didn’t choke me. He choked

the competition. Flooded

the market with magic seeds.

Was magic involved?

How else could he ensure economic

chokehold? How else the power to ban

sales of nature’s seeds?

Was magic involved?

How else could he choke off

a normal trade flow?

How else, in revitalization’s name—

a new-world economy.

What life were you doomed to live?

Must there always be doom in the developing world?

What life were you doomed to live?

Lifetime poverty, I was told.

How did you pay $1000 for your first bag of seeds?

A loan, a loan, a loan, a loan.

Forgive me my children my wife a loan.

How did you know the seeds were enchanted?

They only grow once. My pockets

emptied without end.

And what of the pesticides?

The giant implied the magic seed

has little need—save

your rupees, save your children.

What did the seeds grow?

Nothing, every time.

How many times did you try?

Too many, then I took my life.

Who weeps now over the blighted fields?

My wife my children my god what could I do.

How many witnessed you drinking the pesticide?

On our first date, we secretly strolled

and tossed scraps to birds.

What did the giant say when you died?

From his heights will he notice

the smell of blood?

"Be he alive, or be he dead, I’ll grind

his bones to make my bread."

Who’ll pay the loans now that you’re dead?

Please tell the world what is happening here.

The Feast

My father is hosting the final picnic.

He rolls a melon back and forth

on the slate table to steady it

and slice, each piece bleeding

onto a white plate. The coals turn

gray but still flicker and burn, with raw

meat slung on top of the grill, oozing

blood red to clear. In the river

bordering the grove, a lone man paddles

his arms, stomach pressed

to a blue surfboard.

Black and white ripples

radiate from him while boats knock

against the pier. The children

gather their Frisbees from grass,

their volleyballs and racquets, appearing

and disappearing

in bright shirts like confetti.

Their voices rise and fall. It is late.

The sun shines, but not

for much longer. The golden hour

has begun. For a moment

the moss-covered trees glow

lime green, frozen in their looming

heights. My father: white shirt,

gray pants, silver wristwatch,

glasses. He always cut the melon.

The plates are ready, the food

is hot, the watermelon cold

and seedless. And our lives,

for a moment, are an untouched

meal: perishable, and delicious,

one we’ve barely begun to taste.

Google Search Autocomplete

God who sees

who wasn’t there

who created hearts to love

who strengthens me

God who is rich in mercy

who saves

God how can I serve you

how do I let go

how can we forgive

God how do I change

how do I lose weight

how long must I wait

God how can I make money

how I hate you

how do I hear you

God of carnage

God bless america

God bless america movie

God gave me you

God gave me you lyrics

God why

God why meme

why are you doing this to me

why am I here

why am I alone

why did this happen

God when will I find love

God when he’s drunk

when will it be my turn

when are you coming

when will I die

God who heals lyrics

God who gave fire to man [sic]

God who provides

God what should I do

what should we do now

what is our purpose

God what to do with my life

what is your plan for us

God what is your name.

Snake Oil, Snake Bite

They staunched the wound with a stone.

They drew blue venom from his blood

until there was none.

When his veins ran true his face remained

lifeless and all the mothers of the village

wept and pounded their chests until the sky

had little choice

but to grant their supplications. God made

the boy breathe again.

God breathes life into us, it is said,

only once. But this case was an exception.

God drew back in a giant gust and blew life into the boy

and like a stranded fish, he shuddered, oceanless.

It was true: the boy lived.

He lived for a very long time. The toxins

were an oil slick: contaminated, cleaned.

But just as soon as the women

kissed redness back into his cheeks

the boy began to die again.

He continued to die for the rest of his life.

The dying took place slowly, sweetly.

The dying took a very long time.

HINA AHMED

Oxygen

What do you think about the X-rays, Dr. Smith? Dr. Zoya Khan asked him over the phone. I think we should remove that tooth, especially since she has been complaining about its pain for so long. It just needs to come out.

No, I do not foresee any complications with this procedure, he added, before hanging up.

Text message

Zoya: I scheduled your procedure with one of the best oral surgeons in the area. The appointment has been made for exactly two weeks from now, at 8:00 a.m. Make sure you show up on time and don’t eat or drink anything four hours before the procedure. You will be just fine, trust me. There is no reason to be nervous.

Hi, I would like to see Dr. Smith to talk to him before my procedure, Zareena said to the secretary over the phone.

We are so sorry, but he is booked solid each day of the week. We even have him working through his lunch. Why don’t you come in a little earlier on the day of the appointment? Zareena agreed.

Zareena’s father sat beside her on her bed. I can take you to your appointment.

Thanks, Abu, that would be great.

Don’t worry, this seems like a routine procedure, and it has been bothering you for some time. Certainly this is the wise choice.

Yes, you are right.

The night before the procedure, Zareena came downstairs and chewed on half a loaf of bread, sliced tomatoes, and parmesan cheese. "It is just a tooth Zareena, get some sleep, you will be juuuust fine," her mother said.

Zareena made her way upstairs into her comfortable bed but was unable to sleep as the strong winds crashed against her bedroom windows. The night erupted in a noisy storm, as blood poured profusely between her. While approximately 7,000 miles away, ghastlier winds targeted innocent bystanders, with heavy shelling and explosions of countless missile attacks causing an outpouring of bleeding veins in dying bodies, while enormous dust clouds captured the desert sky, scattering darkness upon an entire city.

Zareena woke up at 6 a.m. to the reckless wind that blew outside her bedroom window. Recalling that her sister had said not to drink anything before the procedure, she did so anyway. She washed her face with lukewarm water, brushed her teeth, and got dressed. She put on fitted, black jeans and threw on a sweater. She took her tincture of rose-hip oil and dabbed it around her bare chest. She looked at herself in the mirror, her skin glowing, her black, thick hair tousled. She thought back to the last time she had met Dr. Smith, who had told her that she was ‘a pretty little thing’ whose presence in his office ‘added sparks’ to a boring day. On the one hand, his remarks had angered her, making her feel like the objectified brown woman. Yet, on the other hand, his comments fed her craving for a man’s attention, enabling a kind of femininity within her that she both loved and hated.

When Zareena walked downstairs, she saw her father dressed and eating breakfast. Zareena sat on the steps waiting in front of the door. The rain poured, and the wind blew, crashing against the house. Zareena gazed out of the glass door waiting like she would at an airport before a flight.

Ready? her father asked, putting on his coat.

Ready. In the car, Zareena inserted her headphones and listened to NPR as they drove through the dark, desolate streets of the early morning.

The United States, along with Great Britain and France, bombed Syria last night, hitting three targets, all related to what the United States believes is Syria’s chemical weapons program, the commentator said.

This war in Syria sounds strikingly similar to the narrative that was used in Iraq, doesn’t it Abu?

Yes, it certainly does.

The United Nations and Arab League have estimated that the total death toll since the start of the war is around 400,000, of which over 500 have been children,